Why did Hitler never use biological or chemical warfare?

I recall watching a program in which it was stated that Germany had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, but Hitler made the decision not to use them.

In the light of the Holocaust and Germany's general ruthlessness in dealing with POW's--particularly Russian prisoners---why did Hitler use such weapons in the latter stages of the war when Germany's ability to continue fighting was diminishing by the day?

I thank God that such a thing never happened, but the decision not to use weapons seems incongruent with the Nazi conception of Gotterdamerung.

 

Hitler was the victim of a gas attack towards the end of the war and was still in hospital recovering from it when the war ended, so that's probably why, IMO.

Jerry

 

That Hitler was a victim of gas in WWI,has nothing to do with it .
The reasons were
1)he was afraid of allied counter-attacks
2)in 1940 there was no need for a biological or chemical attack (and it would not be decisive)
3)in 1944-1945 the Luftwaffe was no longer capable for a big attack on Britain .
Btw :the same reasons are applying for Britain :if Churchill was convinced that a biological-chemical attack would force Germany to capitulate (without the same German reprisals ),he would have done it,otherwise he was a fool .
I know,it was forbidden by some convention ,but Germany was considered as an outlaw,no more belonging to civilised mankind ,an enemy against which everything was allowed .

 

While it is true Hitler had been on the receiving end of a gas attack, it was really a "minor" form compared to the new stuff available. If he had thought he could get away with using it he would have undoubtedly done so.

Unfortunately for Hitler he knew full well that his opponents had the same or better bio/chemical weapons that he had, and the "rules of war" allowed "retaliation in kind" in the area of them. Which meant if he used them first he could be certain his own nation would be drenched in the horror of them.

This is sort of covered in a separate thread concerning why Hitler didn’t use his gases against the Soviets, and why he didn’t use the new "nerve gases" at all.

Goto:

http://www.ww2f.com/eastern-europe-...9044-no-bio-chemicals-against-russia-why.html

That link will contain this portion I put together for the discussion:

Hitler didn't have anything other than standard "gases" (in quantity) much before 1942, and by then the Nazis were in the retreat for the most part. And gases even when used to their best effect are an offensive rather than defensive weapon.

Speer, who was strongly opposed to the introduction of tabun, flew Otto Ambros ,I.G’s authority on poison gas as well as synthetic rubber, to the meeting. Hitler asked Ambros, "What is the other side doing about poison gas?" Ambros explained that the enemy, because of its greater access to ethylene, probably had a greater capacity to produce mustard gas than Germany did. Hitler interrupted to explain that he was not referring to traditional poison gases: "I understand that the countries with petroleum are in a position to make more [mustard gas], but Germany has a special gas, tabun. In this we have a monopoly in Germany." He specifically wanted to know whether the enemy had access to such a gas and what it was doing in this area.

To Hitler's disappointment Ambros replied, "I have justified reasons to assume that tabun, too, is known abroad. I know that tabun was publicized as early as 1902, that Sarin was patented, and that these substances appeared in patents. (...) Ambros was informing Hitler of an extraordinary fact about one of Germany's most secret weapons. The essential nature of tabun and sarin had already been disclosed in the technical journals as far back as 1902, and I.G. had patented both products internationally in 1937 and 1938. (emphasis mine)

Ambros then warned Hitler that if Germany used tabun, it must face the possibility that the Allies could produce this gas in much larger quantities. Upon receiving this discouraging report, Hitler abruptly left the meeting. The nerve gases would not be used, for the time being at least, although they would continue to be produced and tested. (The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben; by Joseph Borkin)

(me again) It was after that meeting with Ambros that the proposed use of tabun against the Soviets was shelved, and gases never again proposed. In one area Ambros was slightly wrong, the DuPont company had already begun production of tabun and according to their internal records had nearly 12,000 tons of the stuff in storage by the end of the war. The other nerve gases were Sarin and Soman.

Sarin was discovered/patented in 1938 and is properly known as isopropyl methyl phosphoro-flouridate. Tabun is one of the easier chemical agents to make, and yet containment of the highly toxic hydrogen cyanide gas that is produced during the process is a technical challenge.

Sarin was found to be even more difficult to manufacture and was thus never mass produced by either the Allies nor the Axis. Only a pilot plant for sarin that had never gone into production existed when the war came to an end. And let’s not forget that tabun was isolated when I.G. Farben still had close ties and were sharing data with DuPont here in America.

I believe the DuPont family and the Thyssens held shares in each others companies, and Edsel Ford sat on the board of IG Farben America! Who knew what who knew?

Like mustard gas, all three nerve agents are oily liquids that take some time to dissipate and air temperature effects their dissipation rates, and all three can penetrate unprotected skin. However, Tabun is unstable and has a distinctive odor. In late 1938 the German researchers discovered Sarin, which is considerably more toxic than Tabun, it is slightly more stable, and has almost no odor when purified.

By spring of 1942 the Germans had put tabun into mass production and were working on production facilities for sarin. Production was limited by supplies of raw materials, such as phosphorus, which the Germans obtained from first the Soviets and then the phospate deposits in North Africa.

These sources became unavailable to the Germans as the result of both Operation BARBORSSA and Operation TORCH, and production fell far short of goals. Neither Sarin nor Soman were stockpiled in any quantities. Soman was discovered in 1944 and was the third and last of the German nerve gases. Known to science as pinacolyl methyl phosphoro-flouridate, this gas was never taken beyond the laboratory production (a few pounds).

Under the Nazi ten years of control of production at IG Farben amounted to "only" about (estimated) 17 to 20,000 tons of tabun being produced for Germany. The reason the total is vague is because the plant fell into Soviet hands and they were very reluctant to share that information with the west. That is neither here nor there as DuPont knew the "formula", and had vastly superior production abilities if called upon. Even though their (DuPont’s) internal records seem to indicate only 12,000 tons of the tabun agent were produced and stockpiled. The nerve agent sarin was developed while the two companies were "separated by war"; but chemists on both sides knew how good the others were.

They (Hitler and the Nazis) couldn’t risk that the DuPont chemists hadn’t already discovered sarin and with their massive production capabilities, also produced and stored sarin as well as tabun. And let’s not forget that the Nazis really only managed to manufacture several hundred pounds of sarin before the Allies ran them to ground and put the whole system to an end. Hitler was more or less positive the allies had retaliatory gas stockpiles, the Bari Italy bombing of '43 assured him he was correct (USS John Harvey). Now he couldn’t even be sure that the Soviets hadn’t also been receiving massive quantities of gas bombs and shells (of unknown content) in the Lend-Lease shipments; a large percentage of which made port or got into the USSR through Iran/Iraq (Perian corridor) and the Vladivistok port.

Even though he was becoming a liability to Germany’s war effort by 1944, perhaps when it got to that point he had no way of instigating the use of gases he had control of against his foes, and that was another hindering factor. He was "commanding" phantom divisions by that time in his bunker near the end as well. Couple the uncertainty of Hitler’s knowledge of Allied production with his own limited experience with gas in WW1, and its use against anyone is unlikely in the ETO.

And believe it or not, neutralizing Tabun, Sarin, and Soman, isn’t that difficult since they hydrolyze rapidly in strongly alkaline or chlorinated solutions. Decontamination procedures for skin, equipment and material include active neutralizing chemicals (chloramine solutions, 5% bleach) or neutral adsorbing powders (Fullers earth). And I believe the antidote for tabun and sarin is atropine, which the allies had in quantity.

During the desperate days of 1940, when Britain was facing a German invasion, Churchill had energetically built up an arsenal of gas weapons to greet German troops landing on England's shores. Even after the threat of invasion faded away, the British continued heavy production of chemical weapons. American war production included chemical weapons, in large quantities. In fact, even before the US formally entered the war, the Americans were discreetly shipping phosgene to the British.

Once war was formally declared, the US Army's CWS (Chemical Weapons Section) received massive new funding, reaching a billion dollars in 1942. Huge new production facilities were built, most notably at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. The CWS also opened a huge test range in Utah, named the "Dugway Proving Ground", where there was plenty of space to test chemical and biological weapons on duplicates of German and Japanese buildings.

The US had signed but never ratified the Geneva Protocols, However President Roosevelt considered poison gas a barbarous weapon. He had no intention of authorizing its use, much to the disappointment of the CWS. The American chemical weapons program only thrived because of fear of Axis CW efforts. Newspapers often printed reports of Japanese use of CW against the Chinese, and Roosevelt issued stiff public warnings that if that if any of the Axis nations used poison gas of any type on American troops, they could expect massive retaliation in kind.

Then there was the existing British "Operation Vegetarian", which had been in development since 1942, and was ready to go. It was held back because of the success of the Normandy landings. Britain had manufactured five million anthrax laced "cattle cakes" and planned to drop them on Germany in 1944. The aim of Churchill's "Operation Vegetarian" was to wipe out the German beef and dairy herds and then see the bacterium spread to the human population.

With people then having no access to antibiotics, this would have caused many thousands, perhaps even millions of German men, women and children to die. The anthrax cakes were tested on Gruinard Island, off Wester Ross, which was only finally cleared of contamination in 1990. "Operation Vegetarian" was planned for the summer of 1944 but it was abandoned as the Allies' Normandy invasion progressed successfully.

Details of the wartime secret operation are contained in a series of War Office files (WO 188) at the Public Record Office in Kew. Some of the files remain classified even yet. The man whose task was to carry out "Operation Vegetarian" was Dr. Paul Fildes, director of the biology department at Porton Down near Salisbury in Wiltshire. The British work on anthrax, or "N" as it was code-named, in the weapon form led (1943) to the design of an "N" bomb suitable for mass production by we Americans. Each particular set of munitions weighed 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds). 106 of these "bomblets" were to be packed into a 225 kilogram (500 pound) cluster-bomb canister and dropped over Nazi population and dairy production centers. There was a second delivery method which would have been even more effective. That was to separate the small "bomblets" out of the cluster bomb, and disperse them out of the flare tubes as the planes returned from normal bombing runs at night. This would insure wide distribution of the cakes, and save on time/weight, and possible discovery by the Nazis as an intentional attack.

The whole thing was protected by the highest level of secrecy; TOP SECRET:GUARD (which we Americans described jokingly as "DESTROY BEFORE READING!"). An initial pilot batch of 5,000 "N bombs" was produced at Camp Dietrich in May 1944, and medium-scale production at a rate of about 50,000 bomblets a month followed. The bomblets were then turned over to the British, who stockpiled them. The plant at Vigo, Indiana, was designed for production of 500,000 anthrax bombs per month. The plant was never put into operation, partly because of extreme concerns over its safety to our own local populace, but also coupled with the success of the Normandy invasion a month later in June of 1944. By the end of the war, it had been converted into antibiotic production, though it could have easily been converted back to bio-weapons manufacture if the need had arisen.

So it would seem that the position of FDR of "not using them unless they were used against we allies" was the determining factor as per we Americans. If the British Isles had been in serious jeopardy of invasion, or if Operation Overlord was bogging down I don't doubt the Churchill and the British might have used the biological anthrax cakes. But neither of those circumstances came to pass, so they were never used in "grand scale" during the war, only tested on that single island.

I do find it slightly amazing that chemical weapons weren't used more extensively in WW2. The only ones to employ it were Italy (against Abysinnia and Hali Salasi) and Japan against the Chinese. Both of the recipients of these horrors were known to NOT have a stockpile of their own. So fear of retaliation was surely a deterrent.
　
BTW, I found the information about the DuPont stockpile records of tabun in the book The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben.

There is a copy in my local college library, which is where I jotted down the information from. It is a rather expensive referrence book, I think I saw it on Amazon.com but the price was over a hundred bucks the last time I looked for it.

Once again,Goto:

http://www.ww2f.com/eastern-europe-...9044-no-bio-chemicals-against-russia-why.html

To read the whole discourse.

 

Adolf Hitler never used these weapons during the war. The reason why he made this decision is still a subject of controversy for modern historians. The most popular explanation for Hitler's apathy stems back to the previous World War where toxic gases were used in combat. Hitler had been victimized by these chemical agents and was unwilling to introduce new and more toxic agents. There is also evidence that suggests that Hitler was advised against using the agents and even stopped their production.

The Germans had produced more leathal agents which were organophoshorus nerve agents. It was developed from insecticides, but much more leathal to man than insect.

The history of chemical and biological warefare


Hitler also called for the use of chemical agents in the V-2 ballistic missile, but the limited warhead capacity of the V-2 meant that not enough agent would survive the fiery impact of the missile to do more damage than a conventional explosive warhead would inflict.

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia: Chemical and Biological Warfare

 

I'm not sure why he didnt use them at the end of the war to try to halt allied advance

 

brndrt1 is hitting on the correct answer regards Anthrax, but well prior to that in 1943 Hitler was preparing a massive attack on England with Tabun gas.

The codename was Laternentraeger, from Greek mythology for Phosphorous, a key precursor to Tabun.

In May 1943 Hitler was contemplating the use of Tabun against England. He convened a conference at Obersalzberg on 23 May 1943 asking aircraft manufacturers for a bomber able to bomb England "by night and day."

Heinkel responded with the He-277 whilst Junkers struggled to develop the Ju-488. In August 1943 Heinkel was given a go ahead to produce the He-277, which could unburden 6 tons of nerve gas above targets in Britain at altitudes where Allied fighters could not intercept it.

Also in August 1943 Hitler ordered Tabun-B into production in a secret project. Tabun-B was diluted with chlorobenzine to give the gas more storage life and better handling. There was a sudden influx of 56,000 jews into Gros Rosen Concentration Camp near Breslau to work on production of weapons. At one of the factories in Breslau work began in early 1944 on converting both V1 and V2 rockets with Tabun warheads. 3-4 of each weapon were taken away for unspecified trials. A bomb for aerial delivery was also developed.

Laternentraeger however was also involved with efforts to create nuclear warheads. In 1944 Churchill apprehended that England might soon come under nuclear attack and was shaken by the first V-1 attacks into threatening Hitler with massive reprisals with poison gas. Churchill conveyed negotiations through Antonescu and it is his testimony to his Soviet captors which is enlightening.

 

Sorry for hitchhiking the thread but an interesting question is also why did the Allies had Senfgas in 1943 in Bari, Italy? I don´t think they would send it to Italy(USS John Harvey) only to store it somewhere.

 

Source PLS.

Would Tabun dispensed from that altitude have any effect at all?
From: CDC | Facts About Tabun

Targeting a gas from high altitude is also rather problematic.

 

Certainly. It is cited at P Anthill's website. He is very meticulous about his research and will not publish claims unless he has found references in literature. Antill's website claims:

Heinkel He177 Greif


the quote appears to derive from Gunston, Bill. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Combat Aircraft of World War II, Salamander Books, London, 1978, but as i do not have that book I can't be entirely certain.

I would say it is the other way around. From such altitude the need for accuracy is obviated by the fact that gas spreads from the point of impact. It is more of a blanket bombing concept which of course the Allies were already using against Germany with explosives.

The Krupp factory at Dhyrenfurth, Silesia (near Breslau) was working flat out from August 1943 onwards filling artillery shells and aircraft bombs with Tabun-B nerve gas. The actual attacks appear to have been intended for October 1944. Tabun-B was more stable than Tabun-A with much longer storage life.

Persistence is hardly the issue with a nerve gas. Gas masks were no protection against Tabun-B. Also the targeting of nerve gas did not have to be more precise than a kilometre or so. The gas burst at ground level. Not at altitude.

 

I can't remember my source for this, but I think I remember reading long ago that the Nazis were not as keen on using gas during battle because they were reminded that the prevailing winds in Western Europe blew from West to East; a lesson they learned in trench warfare during WWI.

This sounds indeed kind of simplified, but is there any kernel of truth to it?

 

I never questioned that the Germans worked on heavy bombers. The question was about Hitler contemplating Tabun vs England in May of 43.

Not really. For one thing Tabun decays fairly quickly I believe. For another if it's not at the proper concentration it has almost no affect. Then when you consider what effects wind had on much denser bombs consider what it's likely to to with a gas. Or are you suggesting that the bombs are going to be spread around? That still brings up the problem of detonating the bomb at the right point. If it's impact fused you have a fairly small location that is highly contaminated for a while but not much damage outside that.

On the contrary it's of considerable impact. The limited persistence means if you aren't exposed at or shortly after the gas is released you aren't likely to suffer any ill effect. Note that the following document suggest that after 2 days Tabun concentrations have dropped off by a factor of ~100.
www.epa.gov/nhsrc/pubs/abstractCBALandfillLeachates101007.pdf